Decolonizing Knowledge: Reflections from Africa

At the centre of the resurgent and insurgent decolonization of the 21st century—also known as decoloniality—reverberate overlapping existential (coloniality of being/denied/questioned being), material (dispossession/destitution/political economy of knowledge), historical (theft of history and denial of history), epistemic (cognitive empire/coloniality of knowledge), and identitarian (defined and ruled) issues. This article uses the case of African Studies to highlight the struggles for epistemological decolonization of knowledge in Africa. It reveals the entanglement of existential, material, historical, epistemic and identitarian issues and demonstrates how responses to coloniality of knowledge vacillated between obedience and resistance through its articulation of three decolonial turns. The article also captures and highlights the often-marginalized African scholarship and its ­theoretical interventions. The implications of all this is to contribute to the rethinking of the political knowledge from Africa in particular, and to social theorizing in general, working with marginalized African scholarship and its theoretical interventions.